[Storm Knights] Any Linguists On the Board?

[Daddy Warpig]

Recap: "Storm Knights" is my variant Torg campaign setting.

The Living Land is the Lost Worlds reality, a world of deceptively primitive saurians who worship Life and have the ability to Shape living things to serve their own ends. (Think "West of Eden", but miraculous, not scientific.)

I've taken the original words in the Living Land Sourcebook, and tried to built a coherent language around them. (Only a small fraction of the language has been built, obviously.)

It's available on Google Docs, and anyone stopping by can comment on the material posted. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to ask here or there.

I would especially appreciate commentary from linguists or anyone in associated fields (or just non-English speakers in general). Any helpful contributions are welcome.

URL: http://goo.gl/RYpGI

tl;dr Building a language, need debugging from linguists.

EDIT:

In particular, I am looking for people to answer the following questions:

• Does this seem like a plausible language?
• Can a language function with the rules and words as I've defined them?
• Does this seem like part of an internally coherent alien language?
• Is the writeup clear and understandable?
• Does it make sense?

(There is one more question that is unanswerable without further information on my revised Living Land. So, I don't expect any answers. But it would be: "Does this fit the background and culture I've given the revised Edeinos?")

[salmelo]

You could always take a look at The Language Construction Kit, if you haven't already.

The only other thing I can think of to add, and I'm fairly sure you've thought of this already, is to remember that they have an alien anatomy, so they'll likely have access to sounds we don't, and vice versa.

It might be interesting, for example, if they didn't have vocal cords.

[James Gillen]

The Edeinos in TORG were actually known for having a natural linguist ability allowing them to pick up human tongues rather easily.
There was also an allied race in their realm who were basically intelligent floating starfish that WOULDN'T have had vocal cords.

JG

[Daddy Warpig]

You could always take a look at The Language Construction Kit, if you haven't already.

I'll take a look.

The only other thing I can think of to add, and I'm fairly sure you've thought of this already, is to remember that they have an alien anatomy, so they'll likely have access to sounds we don't, and vice versa.

We've been discussing that in the Riders on the Storm game, what eidenos sound like. A lot of the extant words, such a Bor Aka and others mean they have to have flexible lips.

It'd be nice to retrofit that, but it's require renaming a lot of things in the Reality, like Baruk Kaah. I don't know enough about anatomy to detail the phonemes available to a species with vocal cords, a tongue and teeth, but not lips.

My contribution was that their extended nasal cavities (from the long snout) give their speech a hollow, booming overtone that's hard for human voices to duplicate (or even understand, when they speak English or other languages). That, and the apostrophe's represent them clacking their teeth together (Tal'Tu).

There was also an allied race in their realm who were basically intelligent floating starfish that WOULDN'T have had vocal cords.

Stalengers. They communicated by squeezes, using jelly-fish like strands that hung below their central mouth.

There were also the benthe, who communicated via emitting pheromones that affected the emotional states of others.

[Bloody Stupid Johnson]

Hi DW,
Sent you an article which may be of interest on the subject - too long to post directly. No other relevant skills to contribute here though

[Daddy Warpig]

Hi DW,
Sent you an article which may be of interest on the subject - too long to post directly. No other relevant skills to contribute here though

Thanks for the info, a very interesting read. It actually answered one of the questions I had about terminology.

[salmelo]

It'd be nice to retrofit that, but it's require renaming a lot of things in the Reality, like Baruk Kaah. I don't know enough about anatomy to detail the phonemes available to a species with vocal cords, a tongue and teeth, but not lips.

Well, off the top of my head (and referencing the aforementioned link) I would imagine that they would lack labial consonants (where airflow is stopped at the lips), and either rounded or non-rounded vowels would be unavailable, depending on just how their snout was shaped.

Of course, their mouth is longer, so if their tongue is longer to match they may actually have access to more consonant sounds. Or at least have some that are similar enough to our labial stops for speaking each others languages.

I suppose the long snout might also limit speech somewhat though, since the joint that opens/closes it is so far from it's front. But then again, Parrots (and a few other birds iirc) can mimic human speech and they have beaks.

And of course, I'm no expert on any of these topics, so take everything I've said with a grain of salt. Maybe a few.

[1of3]

Two books, I can recommend:

Lyovin: Introduction to the languages of the world. Includes short descriptions of languages from all continents.

Payne: Describing morpho-syntax. Thought as a guide book to describe a language you might find, but therefore also useful to make one from scratch.

Edeinos grammar is highly flexible and informal, built around an unwritten and oral language, optimised for short sentences.

There are two meanings of grammar. One is a set of rules somebody wrote down. Linguists use the other one: Set of rules contained in the heads of speakers. Those grammars can't be formal of course.

Also grammars do not very in flexibility. There are languages with word order that is very flexible from an English point of view, but those languages will employ other means to convey meaning.

Also a language, unless artifical, is not optimised for anything. You could say that speakers usually employ shorter periods.

As with all languages, this one indicates or illustrates the culture of the Living Land. For example, the fact that gotak and edego are not words in and of themselves, but rather compound nouns formed by existing words suggests that, in edeinos culture, life and Speaking are the norms.

I'm afraid, language doesn't work like that. I hear, Americans value freedom. But that can't be a basic concept of their culture, as it is made up from free + dom. On the other hand, schadenfreude cannot be broken down into smaller parts (in English at least). Surely, those Americans are nasty little creatures.

Also note that linguists have problems with the word "word". There is no single definition encompassing all colloquial meanings of "word". The term you would have wanted to use here is "morpheme".

Still, the basic idea about language and mindset is very much false.



Concerning, death. Your people will probably have a word for that. It may be, that they do not like to talk about death. In that case, they will probably start a euphemism treatmill.

Think: nigger, negro, black person, colored person.
Your people might have: dead, passed away, with the gods, no longer here

Those treatmills will stop, when the culture starts accepting the idea.


Also note that "no longer here" might be called a word, even though it's made up from three words. (It would be a "listeme" composed of three "syntactical words".) This ambiguity is not uncommon in sciences. Try ask a mathmatician, what numbers really are.

[Daddy Warpig]

Two books, I can recommend:

First, thank you for reading the doc and replying, as well as the suggested reading. There are a couple of things I don't understand, so I'm asking for clarification.

(I think part of the problem was that I didn't ask specific questions. What I should have asked are "Does this seem like a plausible language?" "Can a language function with the rules and words as I've defined them?" "Does this seem like an internally coherent alien language?" Those were the things I was most concerned about.)

Edeinos grammar is highly flexible and informal, built around an unwritten and oral language, optimised for short sentences.

There are two meanings of grammar. One is a set of rules somebody wrote down. Linguists use the other one: Set of rules contained in the heads of speakers. Those grammars can't be formal of course.

Also grammars do not very in flexibility.

First question: You made several statements about grammar, indicating my phrasing was incorrect.

But I think my intended meaning came across. Can you provide some alternate phrasing suggestions which would meet the technical requirements (while keeping in mind this is intended for reading by a general audience)?

I'm not a linguist here so it would be helpful to give me some more general-audience oriented explanations of your objections. Because several of them, I just don't understand.

Right now, you have a series of "you can't say that", without explaining why, or what forms would be acceptable for me to say what I need to. I strongly suspect its because I am accidentally using the colloquial meaning of words, instead of the jargon meaning. I don't understand the jargon meaning, so any explanation you could give would be helpful.

Linguists use the other one: Set of rules contained in the heads of speakers. Those grammars can't be formal of course.

I don't understand this point, perhaps because I'm not understanding what you mean by formal.

Internalized rules can, of course, be formal. For example, a religious ceremony with set procedures is the very definition of "formal." Formal rules can be internalized, that is, unwritten.

(In Japanese culture, the appropriate depth of a bow is a very complex, formal phenomena, and bowing too deeply or too shallowly is a social faux pas. But the understanding of it is implicit, not written. Formal, but unwritten.)

I'm not saying "you're wrong", I'm saying "I don't understand what you mean."

Also grammars do not very in flexibility.

So maybe I'm not phrasing this in the right manner. But there seems to me to be a difference between jargon English (e.g. medical terminology), formal English, colloquial English, and slang. Those are pretty much a straight line of increasing flexibility.

For example, "Nation" and "State" have specific meanings in Political Science, they are jargon. But their usage in other contexts is far less specific and formalized. For example "country" and "Nation" are interchangeable, colloquially, but not at all synonymous in a Political Science context.

There is a clear distinction between formal and informal speech. Highly formalized = many set rules, i.e. less flexible. Highly informal = fewer rules, i.e. more flexible.

A language in which specific words must be used in a specific order, and they can never vary from that order, nor can new words be coined... how could that fail to be less flexible than something like English?

Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying I don't understand your objection. And because I don't, I have no idea what phrasing would precisely communicate my meaning.

Also a language, unless artifical, is not optimised for anything.

Again, I'm not sure how to convey my intended meaning in a way you would find correct. Eidenos language was once written, but they lost the technology of writing. Since then, it has developed over the course of 2 millennia as a purely spoken tongue.

Over that period of time, complex phrases and compound sentences have dropped out of usage, leaving behind a language usage patterns which maximize the efficiency of verbal communications. (Short phrase length, compact phrases which communicate a lot of meaning.)

So, that left behind a language which is optimal for verbal communication. Development trends—evolution—has optimized the language.

What phrasing would you suggest to describe that process and the end result?

As with all languages, this one indicates or illustrates the culture of the Living Land. For example, the fact that gotak and edego are not words in and of themselves, but rather compound nouns formed by existing words suggests that, in edeinos culture, life and Speaking are the norms.

I'm afraid, language doesn't work like that.

I'm not saying "you're wrong", just that I don't understand what you mean. Let's take the word Undead.

Human societies have a word for living and dead. But they had no word for "undead", because such things didn't exist as a general category. It wasn't until they became common fictional entities in popular culture that a word was coined to describe them as a category or phenomenon, sometime between 1895 and 1900. To coin the word, they prepended "un-" to "dead".

In the revised Living Land, there is a Web of Life, energies that connect all living things. Sapient beings—all sapient beings, in their experience—could Speak (i.e. communicate telepathically) using it. In fact, everything that exists was classified as either Speakers (intelligent beings), Hearers (animals and plants), or the Deaf (rocks and other minerals.)

This explained their world completely. Everything fit into those categories. There was no experience of beings that couldn't Speak.

Until they began cosm raiding, and encountered beings who were intelligent, but couldn't Speak using the Web of Life. So they coined a new term—Edego—meaning the "non-Speakers."

So, my claim was that the fact that there is no classification for "non-Speakers", that one had to be coined, means that the cultural assumption was that all sapient beings could Speak.

(Gotak emerged much the same way, to describe specific beings who had rejected the universal religion of Life.)

So, when you say language doesn't work like that, I don't know what you mean. These words specifically emerged because the concepts were new, and new words were coined to explain them. The norm was life without these phenomena.

Again, not saying you're wrong, just not understanding what you mean.

Also note that linguists have problems with the word "word". There is no single definition encompassing all colloquial meanings of "word".

That's true of many words, such as "culture" (with regards to anthropologists) and "State" (wrt political scientists.) That's because language is so precise, an explicit definition cannot encompass all meanings of any word without becoming unwieldy to the point of uselessness (or internally contradictory).

Hence the difference between denotative and connotative definitions. Or why jargon is created by stripping away colloquial or connotative definitions.

But human minds are well-equipped to understand the implied meaning of words, and use them even in cases where formal definitions fail. Part of teaching is getting learners over the hump, where they stop needing the formal definition, because their unconscious parts of their brain now understands the implicit meaning.

The term you would have wanted to use here is "morpheme".

Such would undoubtedly be the technically correct jargon for linguists. But it's unsuitable for a general audience of non-linguists.

Using "morpheme" would require me to explain what it means, and then most people wouldn't understand the definition. It would increase the technical precision for linguists, but wreck the readability for general audiences.

(Quick question: are you a linguist? Because that may explain the gap between my understanding and your statements. Anything you could do to bridge that gap would be appreciated.)

Still, the basic idea about language and mindset is very much false.

Language doesn't illuminate culture? I don't understand what you mean by that.

This is my layman's observation:

Once can discern something of hip-hop's attitudes towards women by looking at the words they use to describe them, and their meaning. Tricks, hos, bitches, hootchies, etc.

Language is part of culture, it affects culture and culture affects language (just as technology, art, philosophy, and religion does.) The fact that we have a word for "philosophy" means it's part of our culture, it exists as a consciously recognized endeavor. If there is no word for "I" in an alien language, that implies something about the alien culture.

Or so it seems to me.

Concerning, death. Your people will probably have a word for that.

The original language certainly did. The word became taboo (due to religious reasons) about 2 millennia ago, and dropped out of usage. The closest they have now to it is either Rek (rot, corrosion, erosion) or takgo ("not life").

Words which drop out of usage can cease to exist, especially in a wholly verbal tongue. Can't they?

[1of3]

But I think my intended meaning came across. Can you provide some alternate phrasing suggestions which would meet the technical requirements (while keeping in mind this is intended for reading by a general audience)?

Sure. And yes, I have studied some linguistics. By profession, I'm a classical philologist.

"The edeinos have a rich oral tradition about [Whatever genres they feature]. They have not invented script and employ short sentences in most conversations."

Maybe you can add, whether or not foreigners have learned the language.

Internalized rules can, of course, be formal. For example, a religious ceremony with set procedures is the very definition of "formal." Formal rules can be internalized, that is, unwritten.

I'll try to make an example. The rules of English grammar are like "adjective before noun". Everyone says "big house", not "house big".

If a certain number of speakers say something at least sometimes, it's part of the grammar. Grammar is less about how people usually talk. That's style. Grammar is about how people can possibly talk in that language.

"Formal grammar" has a special meaning. It's a preconstructed language with a fixed grammar. Predicate logic is formal in this sense. I was confused because you used formal in the sense of, I think, ceremonial. But there cannot be ceremonial grammar, there is only ceremonial style.

To stay with your bowing example. Certain bows have certain meanings. I can now use the "correct" bow or I can consciously (or as a Gaijin less consciously) use the wrong bow. That doesn't make it ungrammatical in bowing grammar. It's like just saying something impolite. An ungrammatical bow is like turning the back on the one you're bowing to. That's not bowing at all. It's gibberisch, and therefore not part of the grammar.

For example, "Nation" and "State" have specific meanings in Political Science, they are jargon. But their usage in other contexts is far less specific and formalized. For example "country" and "Nation" are interchangeable, colloquially, but not at all synonymous in a Political Science context.

Again those are features of style or register. Not grammar, even if you include semantics in grammar.

A language in which specific words must be used in a specific order, and they can never vary from that order, nor can new words be coined... how could that fail to be less flexible than something like English?

Speakers will want to coin new words. So their language will allow it. Only in very restricted styles, will the coining of new words be frowned up. Even in situations, where such style is called for, speakers will be able to ignore it.

Over that period of time, complex phrases and compound sentences have dropped out of usage, leaving behind a language usage patterns which maximize the efficiency of verbal communications. (Short phrase length, compact phrases which communicate a lot of meaning.)

So, that left behind a language which is optimal for verbal communication.

I'm just not sure, how a language can be optimal for verbal communication. All living languages are used by speakers in verbal communications. All of them seem to get along fine.

There are a few areas where a speaker's native language can have effects on processing time. For example, when a speaker's language has words for numbers with only one syllable, they tend to be little bit faster calculating. (Difference is miniscule compared to individual mathmatical aptitude.)

In the revised Living Land, there is a Web of Life, energies that connect all living things. [...]

Until they began cosm raiding, and encountered beings who were intelligent, but couldn't Speak using the Web of Life. So they coined a new term—Edego—meaning the "non-Speakers."

So, my claim was that the fact that there is no classification for "non-Speakers", that one had to be coined, means that the cultural assumption was that all sapient beings could Speak.

That explains a lot. Thanks. So they had to make up, new words in a new situation. That's indeed quite usual. When people first got cars, they made up a word for car. Realizing that cars were possible, had an immendous impact on culture and life. It didn't change English one bit.

So I thought, you wanted to say something about the language. But there is little correlation between how a person sees the world and the words their language has. I see now that you didn't want to say that, at all.

What you wanted to say was: Up to that point in their history, edeinos didn't know non-telepaths. When they encountered some, they made up this word XX, literally a combination of negation + telepath. That's totally cool. It's not very intersting from a linguistic point of view. People make new words, when they need them.

I was cringing a little bit, when I read your sentence, because without the fictional background it reminded of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in the eskimo-words-for-snow kind of sense.

Words which drop out of usage can cease to exist, especially in a wholly verbal tongue. Can't they?

Sure. The problem is, a foreign person learning the language will recognize that most things he calls dead are called "rotten" by the edeinos. How will he ever know that "rotten" does not mean dead, if the edeinos have forgotten the word "dead" themselves?

To him it will appear as they do not make a difference between the things he calls rotten and the things he calls dead. That's very common, when you compare two languages. French, for example, uses the same word for flower and blossom. Of  course, French people are well equipped to understand the difference and express it, if they need to. It's just not usually done in the language. It surely doesn't mean that French people think about botany in another way than English people.

A researcher will perceive that dead things are either called rotten or non-living. I guess that he will make up the following theory: "Edeino language started with a word meaning both rotten and dead. For greater precision, speakers made up 'non-living', as well."

Of course, the edeinos might still know the word for "dead" but only use it as a swear word.

[two_fishes]

To him it will appear as they do not make a difference between the things he calls rotten and the things he calls dead. That's very common, when you compare two languages. French, for example, uses the same word for flower and blossom. Of  course, French people are well equipped to understand the difference and express it, if they need to. It's just not usually done in the language. It surely doesn't mean that French people think about botany in another way than English people.

To spin off a bit of a tangent, language does shape thought though. Even at a very simple level, if the word for "flower" is masculine in one language, and feminine in another, speakers of those two languages will have different perspectives on flowers, and if prompted, will use very different adjectives to describe flowers. I'm thinking about the sort of things described here: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?

The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language.

For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." To describe a "bridge," which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "peaceful," "pretty," and "slender," and the Spanish speakers said "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering."

[1of3]

Your link is also quite fascinating, especially this:

One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we've taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.

I had known about differences in color perception, spatial awareness and arithmetics. I will look into grammatical gender and attributes. Very interesting. Thank you.

[John Morrow]

I would especially appreciate commentary from linguists or anyone in associated fields (or just non-English speakers in general). Any helpful contributions are welcome.

I'm not a linguist but I took some linguistics in college, have read some books on linguistics and language universals (I highly recommend The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language as a good general introduction book).  A few comments:

You write:

"Edeinos grammar is highly flexible and informal, built around an unwritten and oral language, optimised for short sentences."

I don't see any reason for this.  Modern literate people rely heavily on readings and writing to remember things but that's not necessarily true for oral culture.  Works such as the Illiad, Odyssey, and Beowulf were originally transmitted orally (mnemonic tricks used in them are among the evidence of this origin) and other works that we think of as books, including parts of the New Testament and Koran were initially transmitted orally, not in writing.  If anything, the capacity to speak and remember complex things diminishes with literacy.  Also, you'll notice that many of the Indo-European languages have actually simplified over time, losing word forms, sounds, and even classes of words such as dual pronouns (e.g., English is essentially a pidgin and French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese are a sort of Latin for Dummies).  Similarly, Japanese shows evidence of vowel-harmony for vowels that were lost in the language.

"String together the correct words in nearly any order, and the phrase will be grammatically correct. The only exceptions are certain compound nouns and all titles, which are formalized or traditional names for things, always presented in this exact form."

I see two problems here.  

The first is that I don't see any linguistic markers indicating parts of speech such as subject or object, which is a necessity for a language that doesn't rely on word order to convey that information.  Consider:

Bob Fred Give Money

...or...

Killed Joe Ralph

What do they mean?  Without knowing which is the object or subject, one can't really tell.  Take a look at the noun forms for proto-Indo-European or the inflection of adjectives to tie them to the nouns that they modify.

The second problem is that even in languages that heavily tag their words with linguistic markers to have a standard word order, both with respect to the order of Subject, Verb, and Object (e.g., SVO, SOV, VSO, and so on) and how noun phrases are organized with respect to the order of Adjective, Noun, and Relative Clause (e.g., ANR, RAN, RNA, and so on) and they tend to branch in a certain direction.

Bottom line is that no standard word order doesn't work unless you do more work here.

Another big problem is that I'm not seeing any verbs or ways to convert a noun into a verb form.  You need verbs, and that raises a whole other set of issues to deal with.  

There are other issues, but those are the biggest ones that I noticed.  

I would certainly second the recommendation of the Language Construction Kit and you can check out a bunch of other pages related to the conlang (constructed languages) hobby, including Rick Morneau's excellent essays on language, including his Lexical Semantics monograph, and Pablo David Flores' How to Create a Language.  I also recommend taking a look at the Swadesh word list as a possible baseline vocabulary.  Ogden's Basic English list is also useful as a baseline.

[John Morrow]

I had known about differences in color perception, spatial awareness and arithmetics. I will look into grammatical gender and attributes. Very interesting. Thank you.

One of the biggest assumptions modern people make concerns precision.  We assume that one can now exactly what time it is, exactly how long something is, exactly how much something weighs, or even the exact date that something happened on and that wasn't always true.

[Daddy Warpig]

One of the biggest assumptions modern people make concerns precision.  We assume that one can now exactly what time it is, exactly how long something is, exactly how much something weighs, or even the exact date that something happened on and that wasn't always true.

That's actually a big part of Torg's Social axiom (something like a GURPS "Tech Level" for social developments.) The shift from relative measurement (my pace or a cubit), to standardized local measurements (the king's pace), to an ad hoc set of standardized measurements (British system), to an integrated and designed set of measurements (SI, 1 cubic centimeter of water = 1 gram, 1 calorie is the energy necessary to raise one cc of water one degree Celsius). The shift from relative time (Roman hours), to exact but local time (local noon), to time zones. All of these are part of Social developments.

So, your observation is correct and is actually built into the framework of the game.

(Yes, the development of various technologies played a role, like precise timepieces and railroad schedules. They're still Social developments. The common assumption is that sufficiently advanced magical, spiritual, or psychic powers could drive the same advances.)

(This gets into varying models of Axiom advancement, a topic never covered in the original material. I've got my one conjectures and descriptions, but those are House Rules. I may touch on them another time.)